[London, ENGLAND] U.K. supermarket chain Tesco says
it is taking over 1500 online orders per hour at peak
periods, yielding turnover of £5 million
(US $7.25 million) per week and making it the world's
largest grocery home shopping business "by far."

Helping Tesco cope with the increased business is
a new system called TIS 2000, developed in partnership
with e-commerce consultancy IVIS Group. The system
is designed to improve online response times for
customers -- a key factor in online grocery shopping.

"Since the relaunch of Tesco.com two months ago, customer
response times have halved and pure online revenues have
doubled," said Mike McNamara, Tesco.com's chief technology
officer.

Although the changes to the site are largely invisible
to the customer, programmers have re-engineered the
site, introduced asynchronous XML processing,
and restructured the basket management process. As a
result, the whole site is faster and its capacity to
handle traffic has been increased.

Qusai Sarraf, chief executive of IVIS Group said that
as e-commerce traffic reaches unprecedented levels on
sites like Tesco.com, the Web infrastructure industry
is faced with new challenges.

"Because the volume of traffic through Tesco.com is so
high we've had to think out of the box and innovate to
keep their Web engineering one step ahead of customer
demand," he added.

Technical matters aside, many grocery items remain more
expensive on the site than they are in the store -- but
in the U.K., grocery shopping online is deemed to be akin to
convenience shopping at stores which stay open long hours
and charge higher prices.

As well as online shopping, Tesco runs one of the most
successful ISPs in the U.K., and sells (rather than
gives away) start-up disks at checkouts in its 646 U.K.
stores in the U.K. and 75 in the Republic of Ireland.
Recently, Tesco put US $18 million into U.S. women's site
iVillage for a U.K. adaptation.